Chapter 171

[ 1,060 words ]

Gail’s POV

Delia arrived at four thirty without calling ahead.

She never called ahead. It was one of the things about her that had always quietly irritated me, the assumption that the Windsor estate was her space to enter whenever she chose, without notice, without consideration for whoever might already be there.

I heard the front door and came out of the kitchen and found her in the entrance hall removing her coat, looking around the way she always looked around, taking inventory, assessing, and deciding whether the space met her current standards.

Then she saw Aiden.

He was sitting on the bottom step of the staircase with a book open on his lap, one of Grandma’s old encyclopaedias that he had found on the shelf and decided was worth investigating. He had his shoes off and his socks on, and he looked completely at home in a house he had been in for less than four hours.

Something crossed Delia’s face. Too fast for me to read fully. Then she arranged herself into warmth and walked toward him with the bright, performative smile she used at charity events and family functions when she needed to appear to be something she wasn’t.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was the sweet version. The one she deployed for children and elderly relatives and anyone she needed to impress. “And who are you p>

Aiden looked up from the encyclopaedia. He looked at her with the clear, unhurried assessment he gave everything, taking her in without rushing to a conclusion.

“I’m Aiden,” he said. He looked at her for another moment. “You’re my mother’s sister. Right p>

Delia blinked.

“I am,” she said. She crouched down slightly, the way people crouched when they wanted to appear friendly to children without actually knowing how to be friendly to children. “Your Aunty Delia p>

Aiden looked at her.

He did not say anything for a moment. He simply looked at her with those clear eyes, and I watched the smile on Delia’s face hold itself in place through what appeared to be significant effort.

“Okay,” Aiden said. He looked back at his book.

That was it. That was the whole thing. One word and he was gone — back into the encyclopaedia, completely uninterested; the greeting concluded to his satisfaction.

I looked at Delia.

She straightened up. Her expression was doing something complicated.

I looked across the hallway at Grandma, who had appeared silently in the kitchen doorway. Grandma looked at Delia. Then she looked at me. She did not say a single word. She did not need to.

Every person in this hallway understood what had just happened.

Delia was Katia’s sister. Katia’s son was five years old. They had been in the same family. And Aiden had recognised her not because he knew her, but because he had been told she existed. There was no warmth. No familiarity. No, oh,it’s you in the boy’s face. Just the polite, neutral acknowledgement of someone identifying a person they had heard about but had no real experience of.

Delia had no relationship with her nephew p>

Grandma went back into the kitchen.

Aiden smelled the pasta before anyone announced it.

He looked up from the encyclopaedia with his head raised like an animal catching a scent on the wind. Then he was off the step and padding toward the kitchen in his socks before I had said a word.

“Something smells incredible,” he announced, appearing at the kitchen doorway.

Grandma was at the stove. She looked at him over her shoulder. “Sit down,” she said. “It’s almost ready p>

He sat at the kitchen table and folded his hands and waited with the patience of someone who had decided the waiting was worth it.

Grandma set the bowl in front of him.

He leaned over it. Inhaled. He then looked up at her with an expression of pure, genuine appreciation.

“It smells so delicious,” he said. “I’m absolutely sure it will taste as good as it smells p>

Grandma looked at him for a moment with an expression I had not seen on her face in years. Something soft. Something that had been put away a long time ago and had just been taken back out.

“Eat,” she said.

He ate.

Delia had followed us into the kitchen. She stood near the door, watching this exchange, and then said, “Why did you make food for him p>

The kitchen went quiet.

Grandma turned from the stove.

She looked at Delia. The look was not angry. It was not raised in temperature or volume. It was simply the look of a woman who had seen a very great deal in her life and was now looking at something she found genuinely beneath her.

“Do you have a problem with Aiden?” she said.

“No,” Delia said quickly. “I was just asking p>

“Then why,” Grandma said, with the precise, quiet authority of someone who had never once needed to shout to be heard, “are you picking on a five-year-old p>

The kitchen was completely silent.

Aiden, to his credit, kept eating. He did not look up. He had the discretion of a child who understood that something adult was happening and had decided the pasta was more immediately relevant.

Delia’s face went red. “I wasn’t picking on him. I was just p>

“Delia,” Grandma said.

She stopped.

“Apologise,” Grandma said.

Delia opened her mouth to talk but then closed it. Then Delia looked at Aiden and said, “I’m sorry p>

Aiden looked up. Looked at her. “It’s okay,” he said simply. And went back to his pasta.

Delia left the kitchen.

I stayed. I watched Grandma move back to the stove and Aiden eat his pasta, and the two of them exist in the kitchen together with an ease that made no sense for a woman and a boy who had met four hours ago.

I thought about Delia’s face when she first saw Aiden in the hallway. That flash of something before the performance smile. I had been too far away to read it clearly, and it had been too fast.

But I had caught the shape of it.

And I was beginning to wonder – standing in Grandma’s kitchen watching Aiden eat his pasta like he had always eaten at this table – whether Delia already suspected what Grandma and I had only just begun to understand.

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